‘The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’? Becoming a modernist

Dylan Thomas famously exploded onto the London literary scene with the publication of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in The Sunday Referee on 29 October 1933. A month later, Sir Richard Rees, the editor of The Adelphi, would write to the nineteenyear- old Thomas to inform him that poems he had submitted were too good for his journal and that he was passing them on to T. S. Eliot, via Herbert Read, for possible publication in The Criterion. William Empson later recalled that ‘What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing “The force that through the green fuse” … from that day he was a famous poet’, adding: ‘Thus began the Dylan Thomas revolt against the political poetry of the thirties, with Auden as its most brilliant exponent, in favour of a poetry of magic, religion, guilt or a world of personal relations’. ‘The force’ was followed by the publication of ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ in The Listener in March 1934, which drew enquiries to the editor about its author from Eliot and Geoffrey Grigson (and, in a sign of things to come, complaints from readers about its ‘obscenity’). It confirmed Thomas's arrival on the scene, and eight more poems in the same strange and forceful style appeared in national journals over the course of 1934. On 11 December, Thomas's first collection, 18 Poems, appeared from the Parton Press.